Among the many excellent naval images held by the Library of Congress is a Stereograph view (here) that depicts Union bluejackets in the act of resupplying their vessels at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It originally appeared in Volume 1 of the Photographic History of the Civil War, along with another image of a Baton Rouge coaling…
Things have been a bit quiet on the Bluejackets blog of late as we were away in the Archives, seeking out historical detail to compliment the work being undertaken by our Citizen Science community over on Zooniverse. While there we uncovered lots of fantastic information that will help us add further context to what you…
Have you been wondering why we are asking our Zooniverse Citizen Scientists to draw boxes around Muster Roll transcriptions? To answer that question- and to give you an insight into the exciting machine learning software we are developing as part of Civil War Bluejackets- team member Dr Morgan Harvey explains all in our new video!
Not long ago Bluejackets team member Professor Wayne Hsieh discussed the Civil War Bluejackets Project in a talk for the American Civil War Museum. Wayne’s talk is a great introduction to what we are doing and what we hope the results will be. It is now available on YouTube, so if you would like to…
A number of our previous posts have examined the international aspects of the wartime U.S. Navy, demonstrating just how cosmopolitan ships’ crews could be (e.g. see here). Recently one of our Zooniverse Community members @KaiserSnowse has been keeping an eagle-eye out for interesting nativities among the muster rolls, identifying a range of examples that serve…
The Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine Transcription Tuesday event has arrived! We are delighted to welcome today’s transcribers to our maritime community! To mark the occasion, we have added some new vessels to those currently available for transcription. Up to know, the ship’s musters we have been working on were all related to…
Every year, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine holds a major online transcription event entitled “Transcription Tuesday.” It calls on those interested in family and social history to support a number of not-for-profit transcription projects by transcribing some of their available documents (read more about Transcription Tuesday here). This year is the seventh annual…
There is no doubt that the Civil War Bluejackets “Where Born” Workflow on Zooniverse offers some of the most compelling detail about our sailors. The entries in that column lay bare the wide range of ethnicities that could be present on a single vessel, each of them contributing something different to the onboard community. Occasionally…